Fantasy Economics 101 - Chapter 15 (Patreon)

A chance meeting not for the history books

Wise men say, time heals all wounds. Whether that applied to the ones left on the face of a ghost or not was, until recently, little more than a question of purely academical relevance. For the record, the answer was yes.

"No, no, no! Apprentice, pay more attention!"

The birds perched on the roof of the woodland cottage stirred and scattered in fright upon hearing the vailing of the old ghost from inside. Even the crickets stirring the grass under the light of the daybreak sun fell silent for a few breaths' time before resuming their morning serenade.

Standing outside, wearing the same second-hand outfit and with a cowl over his skull, Raol mimed an exasperated roll of the eye before picking up the bundle of firewood and heading inside. It had been a little over a week since he recruited the old man, in a manner of speaking. Elkayla had, on many occasions, reassured him that they were making rapid progress, yet so far, he could see little of it. In its stead, his daily life gained a slow, languid pace that was in stark contrast with the urgency that gripped his nonexistent heart after his revival into undeath.

In the morning, he would draw water from the well behind the cottage, and carry it inside. After that, he would patrol the perimeter of the wards hiding the building. While they kept most uninvited guests out, occasionally forest animals, or even some lesser monsters could accidentally stumble inside, which gave Raol the excuse to hunt them in the name of training. It was only once Elkayla woke up that he would return to the cottage and start cutting the firewood for the oven.

Since he couldn't help with the research, he would spend the rest of the day making himself busy, tending the herb garden or doing some maintenance on the house, until they would have dinner in the evening. Once they shared the day's progress, they would eat, and then he'd end the day by reading the grimoire in the kitchen while Elkayla slept.

As a living dead, he required no sleep, but nevertheless, Raol would spend most of the night inactive. It wasn't slumber by the strictest of definitions, but without it, he felt sluggish the day after, so it became part of his daily routine. In fact, it was exactly what his life had become; a familiar routine. As of late, he often wondered; if he lived long enough, could he have retired in old age? And if he did, was this the 'slow pensioner life' he had heard about?

He was still musing when he entered the cottage and stopped right at the threshold. In the morning, he helped the hermitess move the table and chairs of the living space, so he wasn't surprised by that, but rather the large magic circle drawn onto the floor where they used to be. While he admittedly wasn't well-versed in the mystical arts of magick, he could tell that this one was different from the one they used to summon the spirit of the necromancer by a single glance. However, that was as far as his understanding could reach.

"Why do you make me repeat myself?" The translucent face of Werdner twisted and he repeatedly pointed at the innermost of the multiple circles that made up the magical diagram. "You have to make the inner barrier and the outer shell the same thickness!"

"But if I do that, then the Miasma gets trapped here," the young hermitess, currently clad in a simple blue dress, waved her hand over the same spot the old man was gesturing at and let out a displeased huff. "Look, here! If it's the same thickness, then the excess power has nowhere to go, and it will accumulate until something breaks!"

"Argh! You still don't get it!" Groaning, the old ghost floated over and repeatedly tapped his finger against the floor. "Do you know what this is? It's a modified necromantic ritual! The underlying theory had been perfected by generations of the Necromancers' Guild!"

"But we aren't trying to raise the dead," Raol commented on the side, earning himself a dismissive scoff.

"The layman should stay silent!"

"No, Mister Raol has a good point," Elkayla came to his rescue, once again waving her hand over the circle. "Miasma is more viscous than magicka, so what works for one doesn't necessarily work for the other! If both the inner and the outer barrier are the same thickness, if something goes wrong, the excess power could flow outwards and create an explosion! It's not safe!"

"Safety is overrated," the necromancer scoffed, hands folded and face twisted into an annoyed scowl. "When raising the dead, one often only has a single chance to succeed! Efficacy is much more important than safety!"

"I would like to once again point out that we aren't doing that," Raol noted once more, even as his hands were mechanically arranging the firewood into the metal storage box near the oven.

"Silence, fool! I'm talking to the apprentice!"

Miming a sigh, the skeleton wordlessly filled up the box to the brim. Elkayla claimed that it would rain in the afternoon, so he cut some extra, just to be safe, and he was pleased with his handiwork. While it was generous to call it 'training', his efforts to fully control the strength of his skeletal limbs had borne fruit, and now he could consistently swing the axe without sending himself flying in the process. It was a rather mundane achievement, but one he was satisfied with nonetheless.

In the meantime, his magickally inclined collaborators concluded their argument with the inevitable victory of the young hermitess. Inevitable only because she could pick up the glowing chalk used to draw the complex magickal formula onto the floor. Werdner, could not.

"Stand back! I'm starting!"

Elkayla liked to preface every experiment with a warning like that, but as far as Raol was concerned, he had long since gotten used to the lights and occasional explosions, and so he paid them little heed. With leisurely steps, he walked into the kitchen and placed the freshly polished copper kettle onto the heated surface of the oven. Thanks to some kind of magickal trickery that he scarcely understood, only this spot was hot, and the hermitess called it a 'cooktop'. Whatever it might have been, the skeleton didn't mind it and only admired its convenience.

Soon, as if following a timetable, there were sparks flying in the living room. Then came a sudden snap reminiscent of the cracking of a whip. However, unlike the last time the experiment failed, the room was also filled with a thick, green smoke. It smelled acrid even to Raol's missing nose, therefore it was more than fitting to call it 'choking', and Elkayla soon demonstrated its effects by throwing the front door open and rushing outside, coughing and hacking all the way.

"See? I told you this would happen," Werdner, partially hidden in the smoke, grumbled loudly, yet he didn't even try to hide the schadenfreude in his voice.

After making sure Elkayla was fine, Raol opened all the windows and used a large breadboard he found in the kitchen as a makeshift fan to air out the cottage. It took quite some time, but soon, the air in the living room was, if not fresh, at the very least breathable.

"Oouu… I was sure we got it right this time…"

Her moping voice and shuffling steps reminded Raol of a child who just received his first allowance, only to sneak out of the dormitories to buy some sweets and then to drop them not a minute later when he was nearly run over by a stray horse carriage. It was a rather specific image, but of course, if anyone were to ask, he would have denied it had anything to do with him at all. Nevertheless, it wasn't hard to feel sorry for Elkayla. At least for most.

"I told you, apprentice! I told you this would happen if you changed the formula! Now, we have to start from the beginning!"

"But it should have worked," the young woman whined as she stared at the remains of the circle on the floor. "There just wasn't enough magicka to balance out the condensed Miasma's pressure."

"Should we move the experiments to another place?" Raol offered as he returned to the kitchen, hearing the high-pitched whistle of a boiling kettle.

"No," Elkayla muttered with a dejected sigh and shuffled over to the table set at the back of the room to sit down. "We are in the middle of the forest. We should have more than enough magicka around here, and…" She raised her head and searched for the skeleton. Once she found him on the other side of the counter, she pointed at him. "And Mister Raol said that there's Miasma everywhere, so it wouldn't make a difference."

"Maybe, but we could search around to see if there's a slightly better location," Raol argued back as he walked over, with a tray in hand. "Even if it's only a tiny bit sparser, it should raise the chances of a successful monster creation, right?"

"The issue isn't with the Miasma," the ghostly necromancer declared as he drifted over his head, moving on his back as if he were lazily floating on the surface of a lake. "It's the injection method. To make this work, we need to figure out how to infuse the circle with enough magicka in a short enough time to create a kind of cyclone of Miasma that would funnel in even more of it into the reservoir."

"So? What's the problem?" Raol asked with perfect sincerity as he placed the tray, with the kettle and a pair of mugs onto the table. When he did, Elkayla's eyes lit up with delight at once.

"Aw! Mister Raol is so sweet!"

"Me? Sweet?" The skeleton scoffed and picked up a small jar from the tray. "Look here. This is sweet. Do I look like honey to you?"

The young hermitess hid her curved lips behind her hand as she stifled a giggle.

"No, Mister Raol is even sweeter than honey."

"Really? Am I really like this?" He raised the round jar to his eye-light level and mimed a distressed frown. "Are you telling me I should lose weight?"

This time, Elkayla couldn't hold back her chuckles, but before they could continue any further, Werdner floated between the two of them.

"Stop fooling around, fool! And you, apprentice!" He turned around and levelled a translucent finger at the still giggling young woman's face, his own twisted into an outraged scowl. "I may be the last person to question someone's preferences, but I implore you to stop entertaining this heartless oaf's advances and set your sights higher!"

Elkayla's giggles came to an abrupt halt, and while the old man's words were remarkably straightforward, she appeared as if she couldn't understand what he was talking about. As for the skeleton, he let out a derisive sigh, and delivered a chop upon the back of the ghost's head with the edge of his palm, causing him to fly away erratically, like an untied balloon.

"Mister Raol! Didn't we agree you won't hurt Mister Werdner anymore?" Elkayla spoke up, sounding more amused than angry, and Raol shrugged in return.

"Unless he deserves it. It was also part of the agreement."

"There was no such thing!" the ghost bellowed, though his furious façade was made somewhat comical by the way he was hiding among the rafters, well out of the skeleton's reach.

"Putting all of that aside," Raol raised his voice, sweeping the previous intermezzo over the rug and punctuating the beginning of a new topic by setting the honey jar back onto the table. He looked up, and locked eyes with the ghost overhead, as much as such a term applied to them. "You haven't answered my previous question. You act as if making this magic circle was impossible, but didn't you already use it to create a small snake or something to that effect?"

"A White Copperbelly," the hermitess chimed in even as she was busy seasoning her herbal tea.

"Yes, that. Why is it so difficult this time?"

"It's because of her!" Werdner exclaimed indignantly, but then after he glanced at Elkayla, he exhaled a groan and explained, "I made that circle, with my magicka in mind! I was a senior fellow of the Necromancers' Guild, you know? Eighty-two years of experience in the field!"

"Also," Elkayla interjected, in a mousy voice, "My magicka is not entirely… um... compatible with this technique."

"That is but a minor inconvenience." The words Werdner spoke sounded reassuring, but the way he was saying still sounded like a haughty scoff that made Raol's bony hands clench by reflex. "The real problem is time and experience. Once the apprentice gets used to injecting the required amount of magicka into the ritual circle, the rest of the process should proceed automatically!"

"Uuu… It's quite a large amount of magicka," Elkayla spoke up again, hunched over her drink. "I can't quite match it, and that's why we have to keep modifying the original design of the circle."

"Well, unless you can get your hands on an arch-wizard of the University of Luteanum, or at least another senior fellow from my guild, we have to do with what we have," Werdner continued to grumble, but Raol's mind was already elsewhere.

Elkayla claimed that she had little magicka and that she was more versed in the theoretical and intellectual aspects of the magickal arts. Yet, when he looked at her, she was definitely glowing. Moreover, after observing many a hedge wizard in New Reedcourt, and fully acclimating to view the world through a lens of magicka clouded by Miasma, he had long since concluded that she was the most radiant person he had ever met. In the literal sense, albeit he had to admit, an argument could be made for the metaphorical as well.

In any case, something didn't add up, and after mulling and ruminating over the decision for days, he would have most likely used the opportunity to bring up his misgivings at this very moment… if not for the unexpected interrupting his attempt in the form of three limp-wristed knocks on the door.

"E-Excuse me? Is… Is this the abode of the… erm… 'Lady of the Woods'?"

Time inside the cottage came to a halt as the hermitess, the skeleton, and the ghost all looked completely stumped. Then, after three breaths' time that felt like an eternity, everyone burst into action. Elkayla jumped to her feet and rushed over to the side of the door to put on her cape and hat. In the meantime, Raol jumped high into the air to grab the startled Werdner, and before he could let out a single sound, he clamped his hand over the spectral necromancer's mouth.

He glanced over to the doorway, where Elkayla just finished covering up the ruined magic circle with a woven carpet, and after sharing a meaningful look, he dragged the ghost into the bedroom in the back. Meanwhile, the hermitess took a couple of deep breaths, tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, and delicately opened the door.

"Who might you be?" she asked through the door, opened to just a crack.

On the other side, there was a short, stocky man. Very short, even; only reaching up to her waist. He had a wide-brimmed grey hat on his head and wore thick traveling garments that, nevertheless, had most likely never seen the dust of the road until very recently. Under his brown cloak, he had a striped dark blue jacket with altogether too many pockets on it and a pair of black trousers. Yet, his most striking feature was the thick auburn beard on his face, braided into loops with golden rings interwoven into it.

"Please excuse the uninvited intrusion," the short man spoke in a high-pitched voice unbefitting of his appearance, and he took off his hat, revealing a well-kept head of hair matching his beard. "I am looking for the fabled the Lady of the Woods. Am I… at the right place?"

After a long breath's time, Elkayla gingerly opened the door wider and answered, "Some call me so, yes," accompanied by a lazy flutter of her eyelashes that flustered the man to no end.

"M-Marvelous!" he exclaimed, and in retrospect, his flushed face may have had less to do with her appearance than his own excitement. "May I come in! You see, I require your assistance!"

Without even waiting for her to respond, the excited man barged into the house and took a deep breath.

"Ah, so I was right!" he chattered on, completely disregarding the baffled woman still standing by the door. "Y-You see, I was looking for you for days, and I was about to give up, but then I smelled something truly foul, and it made me realize that I had somehow missed this part of the forest, so I followed my nose, and it led me to these peculiar trees, and once I walked under them, I finally found your abode! Was it a ward I passed through, perchance? Or some other form of magicka?"

"It was a ward, yes," Elkayla belatedly responded to the inquiry of the motor-mouthed newcomer. In the meantime, he was inspecting the inside of her home, so she forcefully cleared her throat to get his attention. "Why were you looking for me, Mister…"

"Oh, no!" The short man exclaimed with a mortified expression and rushed back to her side as fast as his stubby legs could carry him. "Please, accept my apology for my rudeness! In my excitement, I have completely lost my better sense and even forgot to introduce myself." Pausing, he waved his hat around and made a scraping bow, as if imitating a courtier of the Monarchy. "My name is Middy-Aodh of Clan Morend, at your service." He held the pose for a breath's time, and then awkwardly shuffled his feet to stand upright again. "As for the nature of my requests, the truth of the matter is that I wasn't looking for you, fair Lady of the Woods, but a man known as Raoleem Solan nib Toakeem Zeraff."

Looking completely stumped by this turn of events, Elkayla looked utterly lost, and as such, the short man's words could once again flow unabated.

"He's a famous man, a mysterious and wise Barbarian sage from the far east, and as soon as news of his sudden appearance in New Reedcourt reached my ears, I set out to meet this astute individual, but alas, by the time I set foot in the town, he had already departed, yet I didn't give up, and after I searched high and low and questioned the good fellows of the Adventurers' Guild, I was told he often talked about the Lady of the Woods, and so I have deigned to visit your home to inquire about sage Raoleem Solan nib Toakeem Zeraff's whereabouts." It was only at this point that he paused to take a deep breath, face red from the effort, and he subsequently muttered, "M-My apologies. I tend to… ramble when I'm excited."

"There's no need to apologize, but... If you are looking for Mister Raol, he is…"

"Mister Raol? Have you met in person?" The short man's eyes twinkled with renewed vigor, and he put his hands together in front of his chest, as if praying to the confused hermitess. "Did he tell you where he would head next? Or his ultimate destination? Would he stop by Aquincrest, or would he head to Luteanum right away? Or maybe visit the regional centers first? Which direction did he—?"

His barrage of questions came to a sudden end when there was a commotion in the bedroom. Eyes open wide, the newcomer stared towards the source of the sound, and as he did, his gaze coincidentally landed on the pair of earthenware tea mugs on the table at the far end of the room.

"Could it be…? Is the great Barbarian sage still here?" Without waiting for Elkayla to respond, he turned on his heels, his eyes that of a man possessed, and lurched towards the doorway.

"No, wait! Let me explain!" Elkayla tried to reach after him but only managed to grab hold of his hat, which he immediately abandoned in favor of rushing forward with wild, stumbling steps.

"I need to speak to him! I need to know!" The short man yelled as he burst into the bedroom.

Time, once again, came to a standstill as he stared at Raol, in the middle of changing into his scholarly disguise, with wide-eyed horror. Then, as his mind finally registered the sight, he let out a blood-curdling scream.

"U-U-Undeaaad!"

He staggered back, and as he did so, the hem of his traveler's cloak was trapped under his heel. With an undignified tumble, he fell backwards, hit his head in the doorframe on the way down, and then did the same to the floorboards. Then, silence.

Wise men say, history was shaped by many a chance encounter. A general hearing a rumor about an unknown but talented strategist and visiting him three times to enlist his help could change the course of a war. A king's carriage breaking down right in front of a belligerent would-be assassin could change the course of a nation. Even so, not the wisest of men could have possibly suspected how the disastrous first meeting of a skeleton, a hermitess, a ghost, and a dwarf could, and would, change the course of history for an entire continent…